Aabsynthum's Inanimus is the most recent release from the cult Russian doom/experimental label Marche Funebre Productions, a label that I've been avidly following since the release of the Beyond Black Void debut album nearly a decade ago. The work of a single guy named Groza Gabriel, this Romanian one-man band plays a mix of orchestral drone music and titanic funeral doom that lurks on the more ambient edges of extreme doom.

The opening song "Initium" is pure gothic drone, ominous feedback, strings, bells and electronic hum stretching out in a wave of cosmic buzz as a minimal piano melody plays mournfully above it for several minutes. That leads into the monolithic "Are Themselves Simple Thoughts...", a twenty two minute chamber doom epic that slowly grows out of the sound of weeping violins and cellos and more of that massive bass drone, then lurches into massive crawling dirge with sparse distorted guitars, 10 bpm drums and monstrous guttural death metal roars.

It becomes apparent that Aabsynthum's music is deliberately monotonous, driven by an inexorable slow-motion death-crawl evocative of the steady, unwavering work of decay on organic matter, or the slow turn of the Earth through the vast uncaring emptiness of the cosmos. It's far from feel-good music like most funeral doom, but Aabsynthum are more droning and minimal than most, rarely introducing new sounds into the rumbling, swirling death-march, save for the occasional surge of Gregorian chant, or angelic choral voices or descending synth melody that marks a slight change in direction for these massive epic songs. Those subdued moments of almost liturgical beauty are pretty impressive, though, like when the androgynous choral voices begin singing in wordless hymn over church organs at the end of "Are Themselves...", and on the parts where the guitars drop out and the music drifts along in a cloud of sorrowful cello and dark keys that remind me of the music of composer Angelo Badalamenti.

To look for dynamics or evolution when listening to the utterly morbid music of Aabsynthum is to miss the point. Deliberately monochromatic, the four songs that make up Inanimus are embodied with the soul-crushing awareness of our ephemeral nature as we all come apart beneath the weight of time. It's absolute desolation, rendered as sonic ritual; anyone into the solemn gravitational crush of early Pantheist, Ea, Thergothon, and Skepticism should check this out.

The disc comes in a jewel case package with a cardboard slipcase.